Cyberculture agenda: New version of SecureDrop… Transparency in the Tech Industry

At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we’re excited to announce the release of a brand new version of SecureDrop, our open source whistleblower system which media organizations can use to communicate and receive documents from sources.

In recent years, social media has functioned to habitually strip content of its context. Sometimes this manifests as the rage of the mob calling for someone to be fired, or as harassment in one form or another. Shallow, clickbait headlines also strip context from content, causing readers to distrust the publication and the expert source as well.

The building of customer trust has always been the mark of a good business, and its importance has only become more pronounced with the widespread ubiquity of the internet. But the amount of innate trust we place in our technology has grown tenfold since the early days of AOL and Yahoo!, when hardware could hardly […]

A couple of months after the conviction of Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts” behind the creation of the Silk Road online drug market, another online drug market, “Evolution” has imploded. Like the Silk Road, Evolution used “Tor Hidden Services,” to hide the true location of their Web site, providing the owners, and drug buyers and sellers with some degree of anonymity. But this Web site didn’t go down thanks to the feds. It went down because its owners took it down.

Based on analysis of personal attacks and other machine-learned elements of language, a research company figured out which subreddits are the most toxic, then charted that toxicity against supportiveness.

How much will it cost you to get the top spot in the most competitive keyword auctions in Bing Ads – and just what are those keywords, anyway? Wicked talented WordStream data scientist Mark Irvine helped us analyze a sample of over 10 million English keywords in the Bing Keyword Tool and we’re releasing the results today in this infographic.

Jonathan Perelman, VP Motion Pictures at BuzzFeed, shares BuzzFeed’s approach to video content, from animated GIFs to long-form stories. Perelman discusses the best approach that benefits both the brand and the publisher, and how understanding the interests and emotions of these audiences will ultimately elevate both sides through strong, video content.

Last week, the ACLU filed a welcome additional challenge to the NSA’s warrantless Internet backbone surveillance (aka “Upstream” surveillance) on behalf of Wikimedia and a number of other media and human rights organizations. We applaud all of those involved in bringing the case. It adds another avenue of attack on one of the NSA’s most audacious programs—tapping into the very backbone of the Internet and thereby putting all of our online activities under scrutiny.

2014 was “The Year of the Breach.” 2015 continues to bring to the public spotlight data breaches cases that should make any business reflect on its own information security plan, and become more cautious with respect to their data, employees and business practices.